Saturday, May 09, 2009

RACHEL ELIOR'S NEW BOOK is summarised in a long article in the Jerusalem Post. Excerpts:

In her recently published (Hebrew) book, Memory and Oblivion - The Mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, she offers a bold and coherent narrative to explain events about which scholars have long held contrary views.

The short reason for the canon/Apocrypha divide, she suggests, was a dispute over the calendar. The more profound explanation involves a power struggle between the old priestly order that believed its rulings to be divinely inspired and an emerging class of rabbis espousing a different narrative, one which gave human reason and laws a role in shaping the religion. Elior demonstrates how mystic notions like cosmic calendars and heavenly chariots were part of a power struggle whose outcome would affect how Judaism is practiced to the present day.

For centuries the Israelites had marked time according to a solar calendar drawn up by the priestly caste but regarded as divinely inspired. The calendar emulated the pattern set by God when He created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. The number seven would become a mystic measure of Jewish time. The Israelites adopted a seven-day week, apparently the first people in the world to do so, and they too rested on the seventh day.

[...]

In a game-changing move, the rabbis declared that the age of prophecy had long since ended and that the priesthood had been severed from ongoing access to higher authority. According to one rabbinic tradition, prophecy had ended with the destruction of the First Temple in the sixth century BCE. According to another, it ended when Alexander the Great and the Hellenizers arrived two centuries later. The priests vigorously rejected this downsizing.

The rabbis favored a lunar calendar, says Elior, because they saw it symbolically freeing the nation from dependence on a closed priestly caste locked into the solar calendar and claiming divine authority. They wanted to symbolize instead man's share in the determination of time and of his own fate. "They declared that human understanding of sacred writings was a legitimate source of authority." The month would now not commence according to a solar calendar precalculated for eternity but by mortals scanning the sky for the new moon, perhaps disagreeing about the sighting among themselves, perhaps even erring.

Friday, May 08, 2009

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: The Wall Street Journal has a good survey article of recent developments in the digitization of ancient and medieval manuscripts. It's difficult to excerpt, but well worth reading in full:

In a 21st-century version of the age of discovery, teams of computer scientists, conservationists and scholars are fanning out across the globe in a race to digitize crumbling literary treasures.

In the process, they're uncovering unexpected troves of new finds, including never-before-seen versions of the Christian Gospels, fragments of Greek poetry and commentaries on Aristotle. Improved technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were once unreadable -- blackened in fires or by chemical erosion, painted over or simply too fragile to unroll. Now, scholars are studying these works with X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging used by NASA to photograph Mars and CAT scans used by medical technicians.

A Benedictine monk from Minnesota is scouring libraries in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Georgia for rare, ancient Christian manuscripts that are threatened by wars and black-market looters; so far, more than 16,500 of his finds have been digitized. This summer, a professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky plans to test 3-D X-ray scanning on two papyrus scrolls from Pompeii that were charred by volcanic ash in 79 A.D. Scholars have never before been able to read or even open the scrolls, which now sit in the French National Institute in Paris.

By taking high-resolution digital images in 14 different light wavelengths, ranging from infrared to ultraviolet, Oxford scholars are reading bits of papyrus that were discovered in 1898 in an ancient garbage dump in central Egypt. So far, researchers have digitized about 80% of the collection of 500,000 fragments, dating from the 2nd century B.C. to the 8th century A.D. The texts include fragments of unknown works by famous authors of antiquity, lost gospels and early Islamic manuscripts.

[...]

For the work of Father Columba Stewart (the Benedictine monk), see here. For the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (the garbage dump) see here and here. For the Timbuktu archives, see here. For projects to digitize the manuscripts of the St. Catherine's Monastery, see here and here. For the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, see here. For the Archimedes palimpsest see here, here, and here.

The article also has a nice slide show. The article concludes:

"It's being called a second Renaissance," says Todd Hickey, a curator of papyri at the University of California, Berkeley, which has some 26,000 pieces of papyrus, many still unread. "It's revealing things that we didn't have a hope of reading in the past."

Bit by bit, a letter at a time, whatever it takes. Until we're done.

UPDATE (24 May): For more on the University of Kentucky project (which involves carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum, not Pompeii) go here.

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Although there is great interest in preserving the Coptic literary heritage, I sense no political will in Egypt to preserve it as a living language, unlike the Syrian initiatives and more informal efforts in Israel to preserve spoken Aramaic.

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

The director of the Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery in the Israel Antiquities Authority: “It seems we are dealing with rare historic evidence regarding the Jewish people in their country from more than 2,000 years ago”.

A document thought to be an ancient text written on papyrus was seized yesterday (Tuesday) in an operation led by the Intelligence Office of the Zion Region and the Undercover Unit of the Border Police in Jerusalem, in cooperation with the Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery and the Archaeological Staff Officer in the Civil Administration.

The document is written in ancient Hebrew script, which is characteristic of the Second Temple period and the first and second centuries CE. This style of the writing is primarily known from the Dead Sea scrolls and various inscriptions that occur on ossuaries and coffins. The document itself is written on papyrus. The papyrus is incomplete and was in all likelihood rolled up. It is apparent that pieces of it crumbled mainly along its bottom part. The holes along the left part of the document probably attest to the damage that was caused to it over time. The document measures 15 x 15 centimeters.Fifteen lines of Hebrew text, written from right to left and one below the other, can be discerned in the document. In the upper line of the text one can clearly read the sentence “Year 4 to the destruction of Israel”. This is likely to be the year 74 CE – in the event the author of the document is referring to the year when the Second Temple was destroyed during the Great Revolt. Another possibility is the year 139 CE – in the event the author is referring to the time when the rural settlement in Judah was devastated at the end of the Bar Kokhba Revolt.The name of a woman, “Miriam Barat Ya‘aqov”, is also legible in the document followed by a name that is likely to be that of the settlement where she resided: Misalev. This is probably the settlement Salabim. The name Miriam Bat Ya‘aqov is a common name in the Second Temple period. Also mentioned in the document are the names of other people and families, the names of a number of ancient settlements from the Second Temple period and legal wording which deals with the property of a widow and her relinquishment of it.

According to Amir Ganor, director of the Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery in the Israel Antiquities Authority, “Theoretically, based on the epigraphic style, the material the document is written on, the state of preservation and the text, which includes a historic date that can be deciphered, we are dealing with a document that appears to be ancient as defined by the Antiquities Law. Since this object was not discovered in a proper archaeological excavation, it still must undergo laboratory analyses in order to negate the possibility it is a modern forgery”. Ganor adds, “The document is very important from the standpoint of historical and national research. Until now almost no historic scrolls or documents from this period have been discovered in proper archaeological excavations. A historic document that can be definitely dated based on a reference to a historical event such as the ‘destruction of Israel’ has never been discovered. Much can be learned from this document about the names of people, their surnames names and the locations of settlements in Israel during this period. From an initial reading it seems that this document deals with the property of Miriam Bat Ya‘aqov, who was apparently a widow. The deciphering of the entire document by expert epigraphers and historians may shed light on how the people of the period managed their affairs and supplement our knowledge about their way of life. What we have here is rare historic evidence about the Jewish people in their country from more than 2,000 years ago, during the days following the destruction which sent the people of Israel into exile for a very long time – until the creation of the State of Israel”.

On a recent afternoon, Jacob Milgrom pored over the Book of Ezekiel in his Jerusalem study. The 86-year-old, one of the foremost biblical scholars alive today, took slow breaths and carefully marked the Hebrew text in pencil.

On the opposite side of the house was his 80-year-old wife, Jo Milgrom. She, too, was pondering biblical meaning. In her hands, though, were long, punched strips of old printer paper. “It’s like paper lace,” Milgrom said. “I saw this at the printer’s and said, ‘Don’t throw it out, it’s beautiful.’” Milgrom wanted to set up a fan so that the paper strips would float in the air — a depiction of God’s hovering spirit from the Genesis story of creation.

This is not arts and crafts hobbyism: Milgrom is an assemblage artist. She calls her work “visual midrash,” referencing the Jewish literary tradition of supplementing the biblical narrative with commentary, often in the form of colorful homilies. Traditional midrash was written from the third to the 12th centuries, but Milgrom believes there’s just as much of a place for creative midrash today as there is for the kind of scholarly interpretations her husband writes. She’ll promote artistic approaches to the Bible on May 15 at Temple Israel Center in White Plains, N.Y., when she gives an interactive lesson titled “Through the Looking Glass at Mount Sinai.” And next month, the TALI Education Fund in Israel will launch an online image database of more than 2,000 biblical- and Judaic-themed artworks, collected by Milgrom over several decades.

“Jo’s work is indispensable,” said Jacob, whose Ezekiel commentary is forthcoming in the Anchor Bible series. “He’s the left brain, and I’m the right brain,” Milgrom added. She went on to quote Elie Wiesel: “Midrash is to Bible as imagination is to knowledge.”

ANNETTE YOSHIKO REED has published an important article in The Journal of Theological Studies:

The Modern Invention of ‘Old Testament Pseudepigrapha’

Abstract

This article explores the pre-history of our present notion of ‘the Old Testament pseudepigrapha’ through a focus on Johann Albert Fabricius’s Codex pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti (1713). It considers Fabricius’s work from four perspectives: as a compendium of knowledge recovered during and after the Renaissance, as a reflection of debates about Scripture in the wake of the Reformation, as a literary artefact of anxieties about authorship in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and as the foundation for nineteenth- and twentiety-century research on the materials collected therein. By revisiting the origins of the concept and category of ‘pseudepigrapha’, the article attempts to bring a broader historical perspective to bear on current debates about the heurism of the label.

(Requires a paid personal or institutional subscription to access.) I heard it presented as a paper at last year's SBL meeting in Boston and I'm very glad to have the final version now. For more on Fabricius, see here and here.

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

VICTOR SASSON has a new Hebrew and Aramaic Epigraphy Blog. But be forewarned that, judging by the initial posts, this is not a general blog on the topic, but one that focuses on the Israel forgery trial and advances a very particular view about it and about various people associated with it in some way.

Just over a hundred years ago, on a site some 100 miles south of Cairo, two Oxford scholars, on behalf of the Egypt Exploration Society, excavated some 50,000 pieces of ancient books and documents that had been discarded in the city dump, and had survived the centuries in the dry climate.

The excavators were Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt. They devoted successive seasons to their task between 1897 and 1907, and gave more years still to publishing some of their significant discoveries. The site, by its Greek name, is Oxyrhynchus—'The City of the Sharp-nosed Fish', as Peter Parsons calls it in the title of a much-admired book that appeared in 2007. More than seventy volumes of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri have so far been published. They continue to reveal texts of Greek literature otherwise lost to the modern world, together with fragments of Christian gospels, technical treatises, tax returns, petitions to the authorities, private letters, wills and a host of other documents that give a unique insight into the life of the city and the Greco-Roman civilization of which it was part.

The presentation evening offers an opportunity to preview some of the exciting new texts to come from Oxyrhynchus and to consider such questions as did Euripides write two versions of his play Medea? How do modern methods of image-making work to recover an unknown classical text? How much can a personal letter reveal of the world about the writer? There will also be an opportunity to hear something of the present state and future prospects of the Oxyrhynchus project as a whole. A compact display of papyri, photographs, and other relevant material will also be on view.

Please note our registration and seating policy: This event is free of charge. There is no advance registration for this event and no tickets will be issued. The rooms for this event will be open from 6.30pm onwards - please do not arrive at the Academy before this time. The first 100 audience members arriving at the Academy will be offered a seat in our Lecture Room where this event will take place. The next 50 people to arrive will be offered a seat in our Overflow Room which has a video and audio link to the Lecture Room.

Ariel SabarCongratulations to Ariel Sabar, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who has won the 2008 autobiography prize from the National Book Critics Circle for My Father's Paradise. Sabar wrote about his relationship with his father, who grew up in a mud hut in Kurdish Iraq, emigrated to Israel with thousands of other Jews and wound up as a professor of Aramaic at UCLA. ...

Monday, May 04, 2009

In connection with Rachel Elior’s rejoinder to my essay, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls, may I contradict her claim that the classical sources of the Essenes ignore “the priestly context” of the sect. In fact, Josephus, although he wrote for a largely non-Jewish readership unfamiliar with Jewish customs, felt it necessary to allude to the importance of the priests in Essene life. He reported that the Essene food was prepared by priests and that their leaders were priests who presided over the common table and recited the prayer before and after each meal. This is echoed in the Qumran Community Rule where even the smallest congregation of ten men was to be headed by a priest who was “the first to stretch out his hand to bless the firstfruit of the bread...” More indirectly the white garment which, according to Josephus, constituted the Essene uniform was called by him a “sacred robe”. This corresponds to the ceremonial “linen” vestment or “fine white linen”, prescribed for the priests by the Bible as well as by the Qumran War Scroll.

REGARDING EZEKIEL'S TOMB, Tamar Sternthal at CAMERA is suspicious. In response to the APF article quoted yesterday (see first link above), she writes:

The text is maddingly ambiguous; will the Kifl tomb and other historically Jewish sites be renovated to restore and maintain their original Jewish character, or will it be renovated in accord with the Muslim shrines they apparently have become? After all, given the history of Islam, this point requires careful clarification. As noted by scholar Raymond Ibrahim, Muslim conquerers have had a tendency to convert Jewish and Christian holy sites into Muslim shrines. Thus, when the Turks conquered Constantinople in the fifteenth century, the famed Hagia Sophia church, along with 500 other Christian places of worship, were converted to Muslim shrines. The Al Aqsa Mosque is deliberately built atop the ruins of the first and second Jewish temples in Jerusalem. And in more recent days, when the bloodied Israeli army withdrew from Joseph's Tomb in 2000, it was quickly turned into a mosque.

Perhaps Krauss has given away the answer, referring at one point to the revered site in Kifl as a mosque. Yet, the matter is confused when Iraqi spokesman Abdelzahra al-Talaqani is quoted: "The ministry is concerned with all Iraqi heritage, whether it is Christian or Jewish or from any other religion." Does that "concern" translate to the mission of converting abandoned non-Islamic religious sites into mosques, as is apparently the case with Ezekiel's tomb? Krauss does not spell out the answer either way and the discerning reader is left to wonder.

She has other problems with the article's portrayal of events in the twentieth century, but those need not detain us here.

For what it's worth, Arutz Sheva, which is usually quite sensitive to such issues, seems to see nothing sinister in the article. Hillel Fendel writes:

(IsraelNN.com) The American-backed Iraqi government has announced plans to restore the tomb of the Prophet Ezekiel, in a small town south of Baghdad.

It is currently an Islamic shrine, but the government announcement implied that its Jewish nature would be emphasized. The interior is shaped like a synagogue, with a Turkish-style dome ceiling, old wooden cabinets that used to hold Torah scrolls, and the remains of a separation between men and women. Large Hebrew letters praising the Prophet and medieval Islamic floral designs adorn the old stone walls.

[...]

From what I've seen so far, the Jewish nature of the shrine is being respected and preserved. For my part, I am willing to give the Iraqi authorities the benefit of the doubt until and unless they give me grounds to think otherwise.

Sunday, May 03, 2009

STEPHEN GORANSON responds to Rachel Elior regarding the existence of the Essenes:

If I may reply to Prof. Elior: How many Second Temple Period Hebrew manuscripts include Perushim and Zaddukim? Fewer than include the self-designation 'Osei-haTorah? Prof. Elior asserts "the absence of the Essenes from the Hebrew language" and asserts that that self-designation is "too general and not specific enough to denote a particular group"--and yet, there it is! Defying Prof. Elior's declaration that it does not exist. They knew not her rules. No Hebrew speakers used it? The Qumranites did. Dozens of later scholars did (E.g., Isaak Jost writing in Israelitische Annalen didn't know Hebrew?). That 'osey hatorah and ma'ase hatorah are unique to Qumran in extant ancient Hebrew mss makes these all the more characteristic in self-designating Essenes. Similarly, Essenes existed, though Prof. Elior has established that she would prefer that it were not so. Wanting them to go away may not help historians explain the evidence. Common words have been used for many religious designations; e.g., Amoraim, Tannaim, Haredim, Karaites, Gnostics, Society of Friends, Taoists, Gnostics, Kabbalists, Muslims, Methodists, Cathari... The Essene Teacher was a priest; not all priests were Sadducees; no either/or. Elior first calls Josephus unreliable, then uses absences in Josephus as if proof, as if his Greek readers wanted complicated calendar discussion. Those early scholars got the Essene identity right--of some of the scrolls; they didn't claim Essenes composed all of them. But the Essene "Wicked Priest" was Alexander Jannaeus, rather than the earlier Jonathan that Prof. Vermes proposed. The Essene Teacher was a priest; not all priests were Sadducees. For evidence of that see http://www.duke.edu/~goranson/jannaeus.pdf.

Nevine El-Aref reports on the completion of the first inventory to assess the current condition of manuscripts stored for almost a century in the Coptic Museum archives

The Coptic Museum archives, considered to be the world's most important Coptic library and containing more than 5,000 manuscripts and books, are being given a facelift.

Serenity, peace and complete quiet are the overwhelming sensations in the museum library, despite the presence of two dozen experts and restorers who have spread themselves to each corner of the reading room. Since January, the library has been converted into a scientific laboratory so that a comprehensive survey to assess the current conditions of its treasured manuscripts and books can be carried out. Armed with white gowns, masks, small brushes, glass plaques, small pieces of cottonwool and special liquids, junior and professional restorers sit in front of their improvised desks examining the piece of manuscript win their hands. They are looking for parts of each manuscript that show signs of being infected, and then they will identify its causes, take notes and rescue the pieces that are in need of attention.

I wish the article had said more about the contents of the library, but in any case this is a very exciting project. For my part, I hope their new cataloguing project comes up with some new manuscripts of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. There are many Coptic fragments of major Pseudepigrapha, usually from Greek translation and often early copies. These include (off the top of my head) fragments of The Life of Adam and Eve, The Testament of Job, The Testament of Abraham, some Enochic apocrypha, and, of course, most recently discovered, 2 Enoch.

THE BEN HUR CHARIOT RACE for the O2 production coming in September is being choreographed in Germany. Ben Hoyle has the story in the London Times:

As my chariot skidded to a halt in front of them I stood beaming in its prow, the proud race victor accepting the adulation of an imaginary Circus Maximus. Maier looked at me with pity. Lorries rumbled along behind him as he took another puff on his cigarette and wondered what to say. “You were very good,” he lied. “I was convinced that this must be the real Ben-Hur.”

Actually Ben-Hur was hiding behind me. Nicki Pfeiffer has forearms as thick as lampposts and had just piloted my chariot blind from an unconventional crouched position close to my flapping tunic hem. No wonder he is playing the hero in the climactic sequence of Ben Hur Live.

The show has a sea battle, an orgy and music by Stewart Copeland, the drummer from the Police, but everyone involved knows that success hinges on one scene: what the posters call “The Legendary Chariot Race”.

Franz Abraham, the producer of Ben Hur Live, had dreamt of adapting Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ, for 15 years but realised that it was feasible only when he came to this sleepy corner of the former East Germany and met Pfeiffer.

“I needed someone who could deliver a chariot race that even the Romans would have loved,” Abraham said. “So Nicki was the decision-maker for Ben-Hur. He told me that my vision of an intimate, high-pressure chariot race in a 70-metre by 35-metre arena was not a pure dream. This was the jump of quantum for this project. All other horse people and marketing people and promoters had told me all the time that it was impossible.”

Ben-Hur is the story of a Jewish prince who becomes a galley slave and then a champion charioteer in the early 1st century AD. It was a hit play 100 years ago — the chariot race was depicted with live horses running on a treadmill device — and then an acclaimed silent film. For most people, however, it is indelibly associated with Charlton Heston in the 3½-hour epic released in 1959.

The nine-minute chariot race in William Wyler’s film is a Hollywood landmark and casts a giant shadow over any attempt to remake Ben-Hur. Other live chariot races have been staged over the years but none has evoked the same sense of danger and excitement.

One can't help wondering if the same degree of effort is going into the orgy scene.

THE TOMB OF EZEKIEL (traditional) in Kifl, Iraq, is undergoing renovation according to the APF, which is good news:

In the little town of Kifl, south of Baghdad, the shrine of Ezekiel -- the prophet who followed the Jews into Babylonian exile in the 6th century BC -- has long been a part of Iraq's millennia-old religious mosaic.

A 14th-century brick minaret tilts outside the entrance to the shrine, but inside the mosque is shaped like a synagogue, with old wooden cabinets that used to hold Torah scrolls and balustrades that once separated men and women.

The government has launched a project to renovate the interior of the shrine, and the state ministry for tourism and antiquities says it hopes to eventually repair and renovate other Jewish sites across the country.

"The ministry is concerned with all Iraqi heritage, whether it is Christian or Jewish or from any other religion," ministry spokesman Abdelzahra al-Talaqani told AFP.

"The present plans do not include the synagogues in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Fallujah and other places because of lack of funding, but I think they will be included in future plans."

Falah Abdelhadi, who is overseeing the renovation of the shrine of Ezekiel, hopes it will once again attract visitors of all faiths from around the world.

[...]

Muslims revere nearly all the central religious figures from Judaism and Christianity, including Ezekiel. He is referred to as Dhu al-Kifl in two Koranic verses and is said to have raised the dead.

[...]

The traditional tomb of Ezra in Al-Azair (Al ʿUzair) and the traditional tomb of Daniel in Kirkuk also get a mention.

For more on the Tomb of Ezekiel (pictures, an inscription, legends, and a Lara Croft game), go here and follow the links. For more on the tomb of Ezra and related traditions, see here. For the traditional tomb of Daniel in Susa, Iran, see here.